The 22 Mistakes That Kill 98% of Startups: Checklist from a Product Leader with a $7M+ ARR Track Record

98% of startups never survive to see product-market fit.

They don't die because the founders "didn't try hard enough." They die because they were doing the wrong things, at the wrong time, with the wrong focus.

→ Some pour their budget into marketing before they have a product.

→ Some spend a year paying engineers to build a prototype that nobody needs.

→ Some rebuild their MVP three times without ever understanding who it's for.

→ And some just burn out from the constant, grinding process problems.

Why does it even matter?

Every week you spend on your startup is a resource: your time, your money, your energy.

If you don't know where those resources are leaking, you are pouring them down the drain.

In 2025, you can't afford to "just try things" for six months. I know founders who took 10 years to find product-market fit - and it's a brutal path.

You are either moving closer to PMF by doing what actually matters - or you're just treading water, telling yourself "everything is going according to plan."

What separates those who make it

Over the last 12 years, I've helped dozens of founders and product leaders go from chaos to their first stable sales.

Here’s what unites the ones who actually built a working product, instead of just "doing a startup":

They tested hypotheses quickly instead of getting stuck on one idea (and burning cash on it).
They didn't go it alone - they had a co-founder or advisor who helped them filter for what was most important.
They made decisions based on data, not illusions or daydreams.
They knew how to pivot at the right time - and won because they didn't waste months on a dead end.

This isn't about genius. It's about having a system. And it's a system you can replicate.

What you'll learn from this guide

Why 98% of startups will never make a sale and where those mistakes begin.
The 22 patterns of behavior and decisions that kill a startup before it even launches.
How to avoid wasting months on useless MVPs and brutal pivots.
How to build a decision-making framework so that every step you take brings you closer to product-market fit.
How to think, act, and prioritize differently to get to your first sales.
Why your product might not be needed (and why that's ok) - and what to do about it.
What to do if you're stuck, burned out, or don't know what to do next.

Who is this guide for

If you're reading this, you're probably somewhere at the beginning of the journey. Maybe you have:

An MVP that works, but no one is buying.
A team, but no clear idea of what to prioritize.
A feeling that you're working hard every day but getting no closer to your goal

This guide is for you if you are:

A FOUNDER who wants to stop guessing and start executing a real plan.
A CPO who needs to bring order to the chaos of expectations and hypotheses.
AN ENTREPRENEUR with a digital product idea who doesn't want to waste their money and motivation at the start

Client results

— «Working with Dmitry means making real forward progress. He knows how to hold the strategy, even when there are a million voices around. Revenue growth, product growth - that's his contribution.».
Olga Kitaina, Co-founder of Alter, TED Fellow (B2C/B2B Marketplace, EMEA)

— «Our team was looking at dozens of directions and didn't want to get stuck in one niche too early. In 2.5 months, Dmitry's team researched 20 segments and helped us make a decision based on data, not feelings. Plus, his dark humor is the best tool for reaching consensus».
Daniil Sigal, Head of R&D at Palta AI (B2C mobile, US)

— «With Dmitry, we had two sessions that leveled up our marketing and sales. He knows how to listen, get to the core of the issue, and gently - but precisely - ask the uncomfortable questions. The result was a clear strategy and concrete actions».
Ngozi Cadmus, Founder of Frontline Therapist, TEDx Speaker (B2C SaaS, UK)

— «Dmitry helped me quickly validate a new product hypothesis for the US market. I genuinely saved budget, energy, and ended up changing my direction. I will definitely come back for a second opinion».
Ivan Trufanov, CPO at Ex-human, Forbes 30 under 30 (SaaS, US)

— «Dmitry is an amazing mentor. He very effectively helped me navigate a framework towards continuing to work on a current business vs. maintaining/dropping it in order to pivot from scratch and work on another business where the odds of success are higher.».
Mihai Avram, First-time Founder (B2C Freemium, US)

— «We came in torn between two paths (B2B vs. B2C), with traction, but a lot of emotional and energetic weight around the decision. Dmitry not only helped us break it down logically, but also challenged our assumptions in a way that felt productive and energizing, not heavy. You’re talking to someone with deep expertise, but it never feels intimidating.».
Margarita Varaksa, First-time Founder (SaaS Legal Tech, US)

How to use this guide

Study all the methods - they are divided into simple, logical categories.
Choose 3-5 tools that best fit your current situation.
Start with the simplest steps, gradually adding more complex ones.
Track your results, double down on what works, and your startup will grow steadily.

Most of these methods don't require a lot of time or money. The key is to start doing them systematically.

Let's go.

Block 1: Mistakes in your head

1. You're building your "dream product," not solving a real pain.

What it is: You’re building what you think people will want to buy, or what looks great in a presentation. It might be beautiful or innovative - that doesn't guarantee anyone will pay for it.

How it shows up: You find yourself saying, "I would use this myself," or "This is guaranteed to be a hit." You ignore market signals because you believe "no one understands how great this is yet." You're looking for love, not feedback.

Why it kills your startup: Because you're building a fantasy, not a solution. People pay to have their pain taken away, not to fund your dream. An idea can be brilliant, but if it's not embedded in a real user's context, it won't take off.

What to do instead: Put your love for the idea on pause. Ask yourself one question: "Who is in so much pain that they will pay to make it stop?" If you can't answer, you need to start doing research and talking to actual humans. Stop selling a dream - start solving a problem.

2. You're seeking approval, not validation.

What it is: You subconsciously want your idea to be praised by partners, investors, mentors, and friends. Every "that's cool" feels like a green light. It's pleasant, but it's not progress.

How it shows up: You polish your website and buy a beautiful logo instead of validating your idea. You're getting likes and compliments, but you still have zero sales.

Why it kills your startup: Because you're mistaking opinions for demand. Your goal isn't to be praised; it's to get paid. Positive feedback ≠ money in the bank.

What to do instead: Change your question. Stop asking, "Do you like it?" and start asking, "Would you buy this today?" Validation is about three things: pain, money, and action. Everything else is noise.

3. You're confusing "busyness" with progress.

What it is: You spend your days on calls, in tasks, and in chats. The day flies by. It feels like you're moving. But when you ask yourself what actually changed with the product in the last two weeks, you realize the answer is nothing.

How it shows up: Your task manager is overflowing. You say, "We're really busy," but nothing has been validated, and no one is paying.

Why it kills your startup: Because you're mistaking motion for results. You're burning resources without moving closer to product-market fit.

What to do instead: At the end of every week, ask one question: "What did we do this week that moved us closer to a PAYING customer?" If the answer is "nothing" for three weeks in a row, you're not building a startup. You're just a very busy person.

4. You're afraid to kill an idea that isn't working.

What it is: You've already invested three months. The landing page is live, the MVP is almost ready. You can feel that something isn't right, but you keep pushing because you've already come this far. Because it's scary to stop.

How it shows up: You tell yourself, "We just need to explain it better," "We just need one more feature," or "We just need a little more advertising." The longer you go, the harder it is to admit you've hit a dead end.

Why it kills your startup: Because you can't move forward if you're still dragging a dead MVP behind you. You're not a founder; you're a rescuer, trying to save a product that doesn't need saving.

What to do instead: Validation is not an exercise to prove you are right. It's an honest investigation to answer the question: "Does the world really need what I'm building?" If the answer is no - pivot. Fast. Without drama. With gratitude for the lesson learned.

5. You're taking advice from people who haven't built anything.

What it is: You're on countless calls and mentorship sessions, asking for opinions from friends, partners, even your parents. You think more opinions will bring clarity, but it only gets worse.

How it shows up: One person says, "Add a subscription." Another says, "Build a Telegram bot." A third says, "Go international immediately." You take notes, reflect, and change your mind. Your task manager swells with conflicting ideas.

Why it kills your startup: Because you're turning your journey into a collection of other people's ideas. And someone else's ideas, like their shoes, will almost never fit you perfectly.

What to do instead: Filter. Ask your customers. Ask the people who will pay you for this. Don't just evaluate the advice - evaluate the background of the person giving it. And remember: sometimes you don't need advice, you need to make a decision.

6. You're building a "team," not a business.

What it is: You've assembled a team. You've developed a brand. Maybe you've even done some research. But you're still not doing business. A startup is still a business - a risky, unstable, tech-enabled one, but a business nonetheless.

How it shows up: You've hired full-time employees and registered the trademark for your logo. You think, "This is real now, all that's left is to start selling."

Why it kills your startup: Business is sales. Without sales, it's just an expensive hobby.

What to do instead: Sell first, then build. Sell first, then hire. Sell first, then design the brand. Call it customer development, traction, validation, or solving a problem. It all comes down to sales.

7. You're avoiding sales because it's "uncomfortable."

What it is: You tell yourself you're an introvert. You think "pushy sales" is a bad thing. You wait for customers to come to you. But no one comes.

How it shows up:

You feel awkward just saying the word "sales."
You try to replace sales with "virality."
You look for someone to delegate the "pushy" part to.

Why it kills your startup: Sales isn't about pushing something people don't need. It's about solving a real problem for a specific person in exchange for something of value, like money. Why wouldn't they want to pay you for making their life better? If they don't want to pay, it just means you haven't figured out how to make their life better yet. That journey of discovery is the path to product-market fit.

BLOCK 2: MISTAKES OF FOCUS

8. You're trying to do everything at once.

What it is: You've decided to do everything at once. While writing copy for the landing page, you're also checking in with the designer, posting to your social channel, thinking about the sales page, and talking to an ad contractor. Oh, and don't forget the MVP, customer interviews, and CRM. And your personal brand, of course.

How it shows up: You're not a founder. You're an overloaded, underpaid project manager. You're juggling five different directions and wondering why everything is moving at a snail's pace.

What to do instead: Put a hard stop on everything except one thing. Choose: are you building the product, making sales, or finding yourself? You cannot do all three at once. I've tried. You don't have enough life for that.

9. You have no specific target audience, just "anyone who needs it."

What it is: You can't name one specific person who needs your product. You're building "for freelancers, and entrepreneurs, and teams." For this and for that. It's universal. It's scalable. It's useless.

How it shows up: I know, I've been there. I burned a ton of energy trying to build a bunch of my ideas at once. I got tired, burned out, and gave up on everything except for one pain for one audience. And that's when things finally started moving. If you're talking to everyone, you're talking to no one.

What to do instead: Pick one person. Right now. Describe them. Give them a name. Imagine you're about to call them. If your palms start to sweat and you want to give up, you don't have product-market fit.

10. You're doing customer interviews, but you don't know why.

What it is: You talked to 10 people. You wrote down their quotes. You made some conclusions. And then... you just kept doing what you were already doing.

How it shows up: You did the interviews. But there were no changes. You conducted the interviews to calm yourself down, not to change anything. You weren't looking for their pain; you were looking for confirmation of your idea.

What to do instead: Every interview should change your understanding of your target audience. If it doesn't, you're either asking the wrong questions, talking to the wrong people, or you're just afraid to admit the truth.

11. You're chasing 100 features.

What it is: You need to add onboarding. You need dark mode. An animation on the click. A user profile. A bonus system. No, you don't.

How it shows up: You call it an MVP, but it's really the third version of the second release of an unfinished prototype, and you still don't have a single paying customer.

What to do instead: Your MVP should have only one thing: the one feature that a person is willing to pay for RIGHT NOW. Everything else is garbage.

12. You don't know how to say "no."

What it is: People give you advice. They make suggestions. You yourself come up with a new idea every day: "What if we also did this?" Everything sounds reasonable. Everything is potentially useful. You don't say no. You just postpone.

How it shows up: You end up with 19 open tabs in your brain, 140 tasks in Jira, and not a single, focused push toward product-market fit.

What to do instead: If an idea doesn't help you get your first sales, get rid of it. At this stage, there's no "what if this works?" There's only, "Does this get me closer to a sale, yes or no?"

BLOCK 3: MISTAKES OF PROCESS

13. You're starting without a clear plan to test your hypotheses.

What it is: You say, "First, the MVP, then we'll see." But what are you going to see? What are you testing? What needs to happen for you to say, "Yes, this is working"?

How it shows up: If you don't have a specific hypothesis, a metric, and a scenario, you're not testing. You're just messing around.

What to do instead: Before you launch anything, write down:

What do I want to learn from this MVP?
How will I know if the hypothesis is validated?
How much time and resources am I giving this test? If you can't articulate this, you're not ready to launch.

14. You don't have a system for tracking and analyzing your learnings.

What it is: You test something, and you move on. Where are the conclusions? The log? The record?

How it shows up: You end up stepping on the same rake three weeks later because you don't remember what you already did. You're not a founder. You're an experiment repeater.

What to do instead: Set up a simple table or Notion board:

Date
Hypothesis
What we did
What worked / didn't work
What we're changing next This isn't bureaucracy. It's how you preserve progress and stop repeating mistakes.

15. You're building an MVP that's already expensive and complicated.

What it is: Your "minimum" product has 77 screens, onboarding, and 6 different user roles. It looks beautiful. It's been in development for months. And nobody needs it.

How it shows up: You call it an MVP, but it's a full-fledged product built on an unproven core idea.

What to do instead: Ask yourself: "Can I test the value of this solution without any development?" If the answer is yes, do that. If the answer is no, build a version you can show and sell in 3 days, not 3 months. Or, even better, just draw it - that's what I usually do.

16. You're trying to scale before your first sale.

What it is: You're buying ads. Planning integrations. Looking for a marketer. But you don't have a single paying customer yet.

How it shows up: You're building a tunnel without knowing if there's a light at the end of it. You're scaling a solution that doesn't work. And then you're surprised when you burn through your budget and your team.

What to do instead: Until you have your first $10,000 in monthly revenue, there is no scaling. No "funnels" if you don't know what you're pouring into them. Sell it yourself. Manually. Personally. Until you have a process you can repeat.

17. Your team has no real communication - everyone is pulling in a different direction.

What it is: The front-end developer is making design changes because "it's more convenient." Your co-founder wants to start a blog. You're focused on investors. Everyone is busy. Everyone is trying. And it's all useless.

How it shows up: You don't have a shared focus, a shared context, a shared "why." This isn't a team. It's a collection of individuals who happen to be working on the same thing.

What to do instead: Once a week, have a short sync focused only on the main thing: everything related to sales. Ignore everything else until there's money coming in. If you can't agree on that, you won't have anything to pay the people you've hired.

BLOCK 4: MISTAKES OF YOUR RELATIONSHIPS (WITH YOURSELF AND OTHERS)

18. You don't believe in the idea yourself - but you keep going.

What it is: Every morning you wake up with the question, "Why am I even doing this?" And you immediately suppress it, because you've already invested too much.

How it shows up: You're pushing a product you don't trust yourself. You're hoping that the "breakthrough moment" just hasn't arrived yet. This isn't entrepreneurship. It's self-sabotage.

What to do instead: Ask yourself: "If I were starting from scratch today, would I be doing this exact thing?" If the answer is no, be honest. You don't have to be a hero.

19. You're working alone, without a mentor to check your assumptions.

What it is: You make the decisions. You do the testing. You suffer through the failures. Alone. You think, "No one will understand," or "I have a unique situation."

How it shows up: The truth is, you're afraid to show your MVP because someone might tell you that what you're doing is useless. But without an outside perspective, you're just living in the illusion that everything is fine and you can keep moving forward.

What to do instead: Find someone who has already been down this path. It doesn't have to be a "guru" or an investor. You just need someone who will say, "You're getting bogged down. Here's where to focus. Here's what to drop. Here's how not to waste your time." And yes, you can get that from a single meeting.

20. You're constantly burning out - but you don't take a break.

What it is: You're tired. You have been for a long time. But instead of resting, you're looking for a new feature, a new channel, a new opportunity.

How it shows up: You're not resting - you're running from the feeling of failure. And the faster you run, the more burned out you get.

What to do instead: A break is not a weakness. It's your most important tool for restoring your thinking. Just step away. For a day. For two days. No Slack. No chats.

You'll be amazed at how much becomes clear when you stop putting out fires and start thinking.

21. You're confusing control with involvement.

What it is: You want to be involved, so you start to micromanage. You don't let your team make mistakes. You check everything. You fix everything.

How it shows up: The result is that no one grows, everyone is tired, and you hate everyone (and they hate you, you just don't know it yet).

What to do instead: Involvement is not control. Give your team a framework, a goal, and the space to achieve it. Learn to say, "You're better at this than I am. I trust you." Control gives you a feeling of order, but it kills the dynamic of your team.

22. You don't admit that this could be a failure - and you keep dragging a dead horse.

What it is: You think that admitting failure means you've failed personally. That everyone will say, "See, he couldn't handle it." That the investment, the effort, the team - it was all for nothing.

How it shows up: The truth is, you already know it's not going to work. You just haven't given yourself permission to let go.

What to do instead: Call things by their real names. Admitting failure isn't the end. It's the start of a new clarity. Tell yourself: "This product didn't work out. But I am not this product."

Then, take a break. And then, start the next chapter, this time with experience.

"Okay, Dmitry, I've read it. Now what?"

I'm sure you have a question brewing in your head now: "I've learned 22 mistakes. What do I do with this now?"

Don't try to fix everything at once.

This guide is not a checklist; it's a mirror. It shows where you're losing time and focus.
Now, your task is to choose 1-2 mistakes that are currently preventing you from moving forward.

And start with them. Simply. Without panic. Without trying to build the perfect startup in 3 days.

Remember: In a startup, the winner isn't the one who knows everything, but the one who quickly changes course when they see they're going the wrong way.

"The fittest survives" - as our friend Charles Darwin used to say.

If you want to not just understand, but to get a result

Come to a free strategy session - in 30 minutes we will:

Break down where your startup is losing focus and resources.
Figure out what to do right now: which segment, which hypothesis, which actions.
Formulate a clear strategy to get to first sales - not a fantasy, but a realistic route.
I'll show you how to make product decisions based on reality and data.
And, if necessary, I'll help you abandon an idea that won't fly - in time.

This will not be a presentation and it will not be therapy. It will be a conversation between founders.

If you want to move faster - just don't go it alone.

This session will save you at least 3 months and a couple of hundred thousand dollars on useless iterations.

Why can you trust me?

Everything I give in this guide has been tested in practice: both on my own launches, and in the hundred conversations with founders I have mentored, tracked, and supported.

For 12 years, I've been helping founders find their focus and get to product-market fit – earlier, as an employee:

Launched a psychotherapy marketplace that reached $7M ARR in Eastern Europe.
Helped a hardware team prepare for the largest IPO in UK history.
Relaunched a SaaS product, leading to +$30M in annual sales.

Now, as a founder advisor.

This is not theory. This is real experience that you can adapt to your situation.

So sign up for a strategy session.

I conduct a limited number of such sessions to dive as deeply as possible into each founder.

To book a spot for a strategy review, click the button below ↓

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